~tour Miss CARMILA~
August 03, 2000
Osaka Club Quattro
The cosplayers in Osaka were, if anything, even more beautiful than in Nagoya. Everybody was posing (alone and with random people), and there were even some weird old guys taking pictures of the cosplayers. (Several of them got shots of me... o_O I wonder what these guys *do* with the photos? ^^;) I met a lot of online fans, whose names I knew from their websites and postings on the official BBS. Then we all lined up to get in (Club Quattros are on the top of Parco department store buildings, and the lines for lives go down the stairs in a mess of sweating and shuffling fans), and rushed to the stage.
This time I (with Juillet) was in the front row, RIGHT in the middle. I couldn't believe it. #^_^# It seemed like the wait for the show to begin lasted forever. Right before the show started, a photographer came out and set up right under Juillet and me. She recognized him as Kenji Tsukagoshi, who photographs Lareine and Malice Mizer for Vicious. She talked to him for a while, and then introduced me as an overseas fan. And he said, "From Bonjour Honey?" (well, in Japanese) Apparently Lareine had gotten my little message from the night before, and had been talking about it! And... Kamijo-sama said I misspelled something... -_-;;; (On my site? What did I misspell? How do I know what it is? I can't fix it if I don't know! AAAGH~~!)
Lareine started this show off with "Hakumei" and "Solitude", like in "Chantons l'amour". There was so much energy! Emiru had some kind of contraption that sprayed dry ice mist, and he blasted the crowd on all sides of the stage with it. (The cool air was *really* nice after being pressed against hundreds of people for an hour)
Since I was in the front row and didn't have to look over anybody's heads, I was able to see the whole stage. Mayu looks *exactly* the same way he does in videos and photographs! It's really remarkable. It seems stupid to say it, but I was just astonished by how much Mayu looked like himself. (Not all rock stars do, you know. Quite often they look rather different in real life than in photos.) Emiru's bigger than one would expect of somebody who looks so cute in photos. Although he's really not large at all, he seems so because he's much more robust than the others, who are all very small-boned and thin. He was wearing his all-white costume at the beginning of the show. I'd thought it was a solid fabric, but there's a delicate floral lace overlay which is invisible in photos and very lovely up close. Machi's very beautiful, although more masculine-looking than in pictures. Actually, I still couldn't see him much, because Kamijo was right in front of me, and it seemed like no matter where I looked, there was Kamijo... Kamijo's arm above me with a microphone, Kamijo's leg resting on the speaker an inch from my rose bouquet, Kamijo's flower-bedecked microphone stand hurtling toward my head (but I caught it and didn't get bumped)... Kamijo's leg was close enough to grab, but... even though I know other fans do it, I still couldn't muster up the nerve to grab him. I wouldn't do it to any other guy I'd never met, so how could I do it to Kamijo-sama? (It just seemed too weird, grabbing whatever random body part came within reach. o_O Not to mention a traumatic dream I had a week before the trip, in which I *did* grab Kamijo-sama, and he was NOT happy, to say the least...) (okay, so it wasn't a leg that I grabbed in the dream... ^^;;;) But when he reached out with his hand to the crowd, that was a different story. So I got to touch him without feeling like I was molesting him.
The set list of the Osaka show was quite different from the others, with the order completely changed. It was Mayu's birthday, and the fans sang "Happy Birthday" during the break between "Fleur" and "Romancia". After "Lillie Charlotte", there was a pause, and when they returned, Kamijo was carrying a strawberry-topped cake for Mayu. Kamijo held up the cake and offered Mayu a taste, and when Mayu didn't do anything, Kamijo licked it. (You can imagine how the fans went crazy at the sight of Kamijo's cute pink tongue!)
I also noticed their keyboardist lurking to the side of the stage throughout the concert. He has no hair. It's totally shaved. Not that there's anything wrong with shaving one's head, but it seemed a little incongruous, considering that Lareine themselves have such good hair... ^^;
After the show, we picked up our copies of "Miss CARMILA" and bought more goods. I bought a copy of "Blue Romance" (even though I already had an original) because it came with an autographed board. I'd intended to sell the CD, because I don't really need multiple copies of the same item, but when I opened it up later, I found that it was the special version, with the extra photo booklet and 8 tracks. What a pleasant surprise! ^_^
Then we went downstairs and after hanging out at the front entrance of the Parco building, went around to the back to wait for Lareine to come out. The beautiful Kamijo cosplayer that I'd met in Nagoya was there too, and we posed for another picture together. And then we all waited for a while, leaning against vending machines to rest our poor feet. There weren't that many fans waiting -- maybe 30 at the most? Most were either cosplayers or just normal-looking visual fans in generic black, but there were a few gal/groupie-like girls. This time there were two small vans. The roadies loaded a whole bunch of boxes into one of them, and after shooing us away to a safe distance, Lareine came out and got into the other. Kamijo waved, and we all waved back, and kept waving until the van was in the middle of the next intersection... whereupon we all started laughing. ^^;